"How the fuck did our dedicated lines go down?" She asked, holding out the dedicated V Corps line at me, accusingly.
The dedicated lines ran to main post; the cables were wrapped in foam, then in foil, an insulator, copper mesh, then inside inch thick PVC pipes that were then buried at least a foot into the ground. By all rights, there should have been nothing short of a nuclear weapon able to knock them out, and then only if the line itself got damaged by the burst. The line would have to take a direct hit for them to go out. Maybe an earth shift would snap the line or a close enough penetrator artillery round would destroy the line itself...
Or sabotage.
It was 0248, the logbook was unchanged, the cold weather gear was still there, and the clocks were still ticking away. The amount of time they were all off had shifted, but that was normal. The two alarm clocks in my room, owned by my roommate and me, all kept different times no matter how many times we reset them.
"What do we do, Ant?" Bomber asked, rubbing his hands together. All of us were in jackets, Nagle wore her favorite goosedown jacket, but it was getting colder in the barracks and the chill was starting to soak into our bones.
"First things first, we see if we can get the generators fired up." I told them.
Straight out of the handbook.
They both nodded, following me as I pushed through the doors to Titty Territory. The frost had grown from patches here and there on the walls and floor to a sheath covering the entire hallway, drinking the light from our flashlights and making it so that the lights did nothing to banish the darkness that felt like it was pressing in on us.
We hit the middle stairwell and went down a level to the basement, the darkness seeming to get thicker as we went. My flashlight started to dim, the beam getting more and more yellow the further down the steps we went. Nancy's flashlight flickered a few times and then dimmed down to almost nothing. Our footsteps sounded muffled. The wind had managed to slither into the stairwell and pluck at us with icy fingers.
Out of habit, I glanced back under the stairs to check the heavy armored door that led to the Warfighter Tunnels. An underground complex dug out of the mountainside, based on old Nazi tunnels that had been discovered after the barracks had burnt down, the Warfighter Tunnels were designed to let us wait out a nuclear hit, establish communications to coordinate any NBC response, as well as holding barracks, secondary armories, a medical area, and a chowhall. It had taken the engineers almost six months to refit the Nazi tunnels, and the entrance to the Warfighter Tunnels beneath our barracks was a two-foot thick door that looked like it belonged on a bank safe. I'd seen the tunnels, built in the 1930's by the German military, and I had to admit that they had been impressive. There had even been two U-Boat engines that had been installed to provide the small complex with power.
I turned from the heavy steel doors, weighing in my mind whether or not we'd be able to pull back to the War Fighter tunnels if things got too bad for us. I didn't know the door codes, nobody below the position of Section Sergeant was supposed to know. I made a mental note to find out the codes, by hook or by crook, if I survived whatever was going on.
The door barracks maintenance room was closed, covered in frost, and neither Nancy nor Bomber said anything about me sweeping my light across it quickly, checking the edges of the door for wires. When Bomber tried the door, where the furnaces and water heaters were located, he found it locked.
We needed to get to the generator room, which was down in what used to be the sub-basement, and we had to access it by going into the furnace/water heater room. The original barracks had gone three levels down, and rumor control had it that when they'd excavated the bottom level they'd found bodies of dead Jews, victims of SS training techniques, thrown into a mass grave at the bottom of the building.
Bomber moved aside and I moved to unlock the door, hanging my L-shaped military issue flashlight from my Levi jacket pocket by its clip. When I dug my keys out of my pocket my flashlight went dead. Bomber and Nagle waited for me to switch the batteries in it before we opened the door. Before the barracks had burned down the previous winter I'd learned the lesson: Never go anywhere in the building without extra batteries. Always store the batteries wrapped in paper and then wrap the batteries with tinfoil.
It took a lot of effort to pull open the door to the maintenance and storage area. The door was at least six inches thick, made of steel, with a concrete core. The whole barracks was designed like that, brute force to resist a near nuclear hit. Thick cinderblock walls, reinforced with steel rebars and the holes in the cinderblocks filled with concrete. The outside walls were a foot thick, the interior walls six inches, the room doors steel cored, the windows double-paned, and the stairs designed to flex, each step separate from the others, held together by a steel lattice.
As soon as the door cracked open the stench wafted over us: Rotting meat and blood, the reek of decay so thick you could taste it. There was no reason for it, but it was a feature of the maintenance and storage area, and sometimes during the summer a few of the rooms in Queer Country had the same smell. Nobody lived in those rooms during those times, even though people were assigned to them. Like most of us, the soldiers in Queer Country preferred to double and triple up rather than stay in their rooms alone, and the stench was as good a reason as any to abandon a room you'd been assigned to. The vents had all been checked repeatedly, there was no reason for it, but the stench still remained.
Rumor control had it that it was the bodies that had been excavated under the building.
We moved into the huge room. The ceiling was fifteen feet above us, with conduits of wiring, pipes for water and sewage snaking across it. The fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling were dark and silent, the light and almost subliminal buzzing noise absent as we moved into the room, sweeping our flashlights around.
The little lizard was wide awake and alert, pushing my spatial awareness out, and I felt the cool chill of adrenaline down my spine as it lightly pushed on the combat button.
The massive hot water heaters sat silently against the left-hand wall, at about the center of the room. Three huge oil tanks squatted between the water heaters and the half-dozen silent furnaces. The room felt claustrophobic, despite the size - all bare unpainted concrete, reinforced concrete that felt like it was pressing in on you. Pallets of canvas covered war-stock lined the far side of the room, and the door to the stairwell to the sub-basement was at the halfway point, across the room from the oil tanks. The war-stock had everything our unit needed to be able to roll out and fight when the Russians pushed into the Fulda Gap. Sleeping bags, canteens, web-gear (LBE's), rucksacks; basically the TA-50 we were already issued. The war-stocks made sure that we'd have all the equipment we needed no matter what.
"We should have stayed at Atlas." Nagle bitched, breaking the silence. "I'm so cold my fucking nipples are going to fall off." The echo was muted, but present, making her voice sound weird. The fact that the echoes faded into barely heard whispers that stayed present was something we ignored.
It wasn't anything new.
I grinned at her, motioning at my two friends to wait for me. Nancy nodded, blowing on her hands and rubbing them together to warm them up. Bomber kept his hands in his jacket pockets, his teeth chattering slightly. I quickly moved to the switch boxes and moved the big handle switches from external to internal power, then came back. We bitched for a few minutes about how cold it was, walking over to the door and quickly unlocking it. When I hauled the door opened, the smell washed over us, even thicker.
Decay.
All of the basements on the far side of the building always smelled like there was something dead down there, and no matter how much time had passed, no matter how well it was searched with nothing found, it always smelled like death. The sub-basement we'd just opened up was the worst, smelling like a dead deer I'd found one summer, and usually the stench conjured up the mental image of maggots swarming in black and greasy rotted meat.
My brain sum
moned up the image of dead women and children this time.
All three of us pulled our flashlights off our pockets, the snap of the metal clips hitting the plastic body of the flashlights loud in the silence, and shined the light into the stairs. The darkness of the stairwell swallowed the light and gave nothing but the faint sparkle of frost in return. We looked at one another when a low moan of pain drifted up the stairs, shrugged, and as one put our flashlights back onto our pockets. The bulb was on the short end of the L-shaped flashlight, and the way it was designed meant that the clip would keep it hanging from a pocket or a soldier's Load Bearing Equipment, with the beam shining forward.
The darkness still swallowed up the light.
We went down the stairs carefully, holding onto the banister, unconsciously clustering together despite the fact that the military had hammered into us to avoid clustering up. If you were clustered up, a single grenade or burst of enemy fire could take you out.
The cold and darkness were far more old and hardwired than just training.
When we reached the landing I faced the door to the generator room, ignoring the other three doors in the short hallway. All of them led to rooms that contained additional war stocks for use in the barracks that had to be kept in secured areas: NVG's, additional weapons, Kevlar body armor and Kevlar helmets, heavy weapons, radios, code equipment, computers in EMP shielded boxes, whatever we needed to fight a war if our primary stocks were damaged.
The METL stated that if it ever went to verified war with the Soviet Union and we had the time, we were supposed to draw everything from war stocks instead of using our standard issued gear. That way the equipment would have less of a chance of failure, and we'd have every piece of equipment we needed.
We all knew that if the balloon went up, there wasn't much chance that we'd have time to do anything more than grab our issue and our rucks and move fast. More than likely the building and the war stocks inside would get destroyed. Instead, we'd probably have to rely on what we'd grabbed from our issue and what was inside the Warfighter Tunnels.
My key fit smoothly in the lock to the generator room, and I unlocked it, staring at the stenciled legend "EMERGENCY POWER" on the door that was covered in a layer of ice that might have started as frost before it thickened into real ice.
According to the inventory sheets beside the door, the generator room contained four 5K generators and two 60K generators. Six fuel tanks were outside the building to provide fuel during the summer, two down in the sub-basement with the generators, eight tanks inside the building to provide fuel for the water heaters and the central heating units. Like the oil tanks, they were inside the building to prevent slurry or freezing in the pipes or lines as well as being secured to protect them from any damage from any surgical strike against our unit.
Bomber checked the security logbook before he dropped the cover and shook his head. "Nobody's checked this tonight." I nodded, snorting with a mixture of amusement and disgust. It was pretty much par for the course that nobody bothered to check the sub-basement during the night, just went in and signed the whole sheet at once toward the end of the night so you wouldn't have to put up with the smell and the cold. I knew that whoever I had been on CQ with had always told me to just make sure the door was locked and then sign off on the log—if they even sent me down to make the check during the night.
"We'll fire up the generators, then sweep the barracks and see if we can find Jakes and the others,” I said. Bomber grunted and Nagle just nodded, shivering. She had her hands in her armpits to try to keep them warm, and I made a mental note to swing by our rooms and grab our gloves before we lost fingernails to frostbite.
I pulled open the door to the generator room, already thinking about what order I'd need to fire them up. I was looking forward to getting first the generators and then the water heaters and furnaces running. My brain ticked through that the water heaters needed to be priority, since living areas were heated via radiators, and the oil furnaces would be used to warm up the rest of the big ass building via forced air. At the rate the temperature was dropping, we'd need to wake everyone up, or at least check on them, and make sure we didn't have any cold weather casualties.
I flashed my light into the room while thinking over the steps I'd need to take.
The cables that led into the ceiling or walls glimmered, black under the frost. The fuel tanks sat solidly, full of diesel fuel, coated in frost. The set of double doors that led to the hallway which allowed access to the loading dock looked like they were frozen shut. The chain looked like it had been coated with pixie dust by Tinker Bell.
And no generators.
The smell of decay had rolled over the three of us, Nagle gagging.
"What the fuck?" Bomber said, then coughed from the stench.
The lizard hissed in hatred, its instincts sure that it was all a trap.
A scream ripped down the stairwell behind us, the door flying open, crashing against the wall, and then slamming shut.
Sweep & Clear
"Millions were spent to make 2/19th
Special Weapons Group active.
It all went to contractors, who, in turn
pocketed it and left us holding the bag."
"I hate this fucking place!" I yelled, staring at the mostly empty room. I was shaking with rage that we'd been betrayed again.
"Where are the fucking generators?" Nagle asked, stepping into the room and looking around. "There's supposed to be generators in here."
"Goddamn black market assholes." Bomber grumbled, then turned and looked at me. "What's the plan, smart guy?"
I looked at the empty room, wondering where the Hell all that sheer weight of metal could have gone. You needed a goddamn forklift to move 5KW generators, a pallet jack at the very least. 60KW generators usually were on a trailer frame and needed a vehicle to move them, unless you got two pallet jacks, over pressurized the hydraulic cylinder, and used ropes so you could have five to ten people pulling on each jack. They would have been bolted to the floors, and immovable.
Only they were gone.
"I have no idea." I admitted, walking in and stopping next to the fuel tanks. Out of curiosity I knocked on them all the way down the sides.
Empty.
Fuck.
Nagle checked the lock on the chains on the door that led to the access hallway, pulling on it for moment. Locked. I bent down and took a look at the hoses that led from both the pipes on the walls and the fuel tanks.
Not a single scratch or nick on the copper nipple.
I sniffed them, but all I smelled was the ever present smell of decay.
The tanks had never been filled, the pipes never hooked up to generators.
"We're not in trouble that bad." Bomber said from the darkness behind me. Nagle was panning her flashlight over the ceiling, pointing out icicles silently. Some of them almost a foot long and I figured the ice on the ceiling was at least two inches thick.
"Yeah, I heard freezing to death isn't that bad of a way to go." Nagle sneered at him, pulling her flashlight off the ceiling and panning it over the wall.
"He's right." I told her, standing up and shivering again. "The furnaces and water heater are all oil fired. We'll get them running and then figure out what to do." I rubbed my hands together, trying to stave off the tingling swollen feeling that was starting to push away the cold.
"My thought exactly." Bomber grinned. "Glad to hear you agree with my plan." I made a face. Typical Bomber. He always claimed people's plans like they were his own when we were bullshitting around or it was just the three of us, but he didn't actually steal the credit for the ideas people made when it was important, and that's what mattered.
"Let's get moving." I grunted. The little lizard was still grumbling, positive we were about to be ambushed.
We headed back up the stairs after closing the generator room door and locking it. The cavernous basement swallowed our lights, and I could almost feel the darkness pressing on us, and for some reason
I became very aware of the building squatting over us. A building that had been built by the lowest bidder. A building that almost exactly followed the floor plan of a barracks that had tried its damnedest to kill me and 19 other people, including my older brother. A building that had already been found to have serious construction faults like crumbling mortar, cracked foundation slabs, substandard plumbing, and bad electrical systems.
"Fuck, these things are electrically fired." Bomber said after taking the panel off the first massive water heater and looking inside with his flashlight. "You press the button and hold it till the burners light up and the fans kick on. They need juice to run." He waved his flashlight around at the darkness. "And we're out of juice."
"We'll have to do it the hard way." I said, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it real quick. I knelt down and looked inside, pointing out to Bomber where to shine the light. The data sheet on the water heater was still on the inside of the panel and I stared at it for a long time, memorizing parts of it.
"Well?" Nagle asked. She was shining her light in steady sweeps across the darkness and I could hear her teeth chattering. Bomber was knocking on the oil tanks and getting back dull thumps. Full.
Thank God.
"Bomber's right. It needs electrical; we're going to have to do this the hard way." I said, standing back up and holding my hand out to Bomber. I heaved him up and his knees popped. I panned my flashlight across the wall before lying down and then wiggling between the two heaters so I could see behind them.
A scream echoed through the basement, raising goosebumps on my arms. I was suddenly very aware that I was pinned between, and slightly behind, water heaters that probably weighed about two tons. Without water. The lizard was close to panicking, and the feeling of being trapped swept over me like an avalanche.
"Yeah, I think we can do this the hard way." I told them after examining the wiring for a few moments. It took everything I had to keep laying there in the dark, the heavy water heaters pressing against me.
Three Little Snowmen (Damned of the 2/19th) Page 14
